


counterpoint

by lupinely



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, M/M, pre-WWII through CACW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 13:10:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7464606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They told you it would hurt, they told you it would never last, they told you that you would never be happy. They told you not to bother. They told you to do it right, to do anything on earth but this: be anything but this. You tried to listen.</p>
<p>But they never told you—that even though you know all of that, even though you saw the house on fire down the street—you would still love him anyway.</p>
<p>What the hell? You feel like they probably could have mentioned it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	counterpoint

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for: violence, homophobia, sex, references to all the things that happen to Bucky in canon. Sideways-truths.

 

 

 

 

“Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.”  
—Franz Kafka, from _The Blue Octavo Notebooks_

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

There are many versions of this story. Unfortunately, we only have time for one. Here are all the things they never told you would happen, but they did. Here are all the things you wish you’d known.

 

(1943)

Steve keeps kicking a rock ahead of him as the two of you walk down the road. He’s pissed off, and you’re afraid to ask why in case it sets him off again. Usually he comes to you with it in his own time if it matters, or even if it doesn’t and he just wants someone to hold his hand and pet his hair and tell him it will be all right. Metaphorically.

“I’m so goddamn sick of this,” Steve finally says. He isn’t looking at you. His hands are plunged deep in his pockets and his bangs hang low over his eyes. “I can’t—do anything, Bucky.”

“You can do plenty.”

“Don’t fucking patronize me,” Steve says, but he’s not angry with you, not exactly; “you know what I mean. I’m—” he gestures at himself like that’s enough of an explanation. You know what he wants you to acknowledge: his arthritis, his asthma, the pneumonia he gets every winter, the low-level pain that is the background of his everyday life that sometimes keeps him in bed all day so that he misses work and gets fired and you have to smudge the numbers a little to help cover some of his bills. That’s what he wants you to think about. But you can’t stop thinking about all the rest of it.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” Steve says. “I’m gonna—listen, Buck. I was supposed to do great things. I’m going to. I want to be....”

Good, he wants to say, though he doesn’t, but you’ve heard him say it before and you know that it is what comes next.

“You will, though,” you tell him. You don’t doubt it. He resents you for what he thinks is your false optimism, your forced belief in him. “Trust me.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he says. Two months later he applies for the army and gets rejected. The first time, anyway.

 

 

 

 

“Fuck me,” he begs you, and this time you resent him for it but you resent yourself more for not being brave enough, for being a stupid fucking asshole, for all the things that the both of you will never say in the light of day but which you let completely dominate you at moments like these, take control of you, force everything else under, down, gone.

That’s just life, you tell yourself. Those two neighbors of yours who lived down the street together, who everyone talked about in whispers, who women crossed the street to avoid sometimes if they saw them coming, all because—well. And they aren’t the only ones; hell, there are dozens of people like you, scattered all around Brooklyn, and the braver ones get together and dance and drink and flip the metaphorical finger to life but the rest of you hide and try not to think about it and lie about who you are. Anyway, the two of them, those older guys you grew up hearing about in little funny whispers, half-acknowledged truths, well, they had that molotov thrown through their front window, didn’t they, and half their house burned down. They were all right, if you can be all right after something like that, but they moved away and the house got boarded up and it’s still there, empty, with its windows with plywood over them, staring at you every time you go down the street.

And you get to thinking—you’re just like that house. You’re just as empty and you’ve got the scorch marks inside to prove it. You don’t know who tossed the bomb through your front window but someone did, and the fire is out but you can still smell the smoke and hear someone screaming. It might even be you. The house is empty now, but its ghosts sure aren’t, and you don’t want to carry them around anymore.

“Goddammit, Bucky, come on, I’m—oh—!” Steve says, and his hands grip your hips more tightly and he shakes and then he comes and you think: fuck you, yeah, I’ll fuck you, but I won’t talk to you about it in the morning. And you’ll get that look on your face, but if you put your head to my chest you will hear the screaming, the burning. All the places where I’m still on fire, a cold fire, a terrible cold storm.

You want him to hurt you but he doesn’t, of course. He gets it. Steve is just as cognizant of reality as you are. So it’s nothing. It’s a fuck or two, or three, or three hundred, you can’t tell anymore as the years stretch by and you’re no longer nineteen and stupid. You’re twenty-six and sad and bitter and you keep bringing girls home and Steve keeps looking at you with that look on his face. It’s for your own safety, Steve, you want to tell him. It’s so the front windows of your face don’t get smashed apart with bricks.

He lies back now, trembling. He reaches out for you, but you turn your face away and his hands close, for a moment, on empty air, then fall to your shoulders. You’re still hard but you feel spent and tired and you pull away and lie back while Steve watches you, his eyes dark and lidded. Before you can react, he reaches over and finishes you off, then hands you a cigarette while you’re still coming and gasping into empty air. Like he doesn’t expect you to roll over anymore and pull him close anymore, like he doesn’t expect you to reach out for him back.

Sorry, you think; sorry, and you remember when you would press kisses to his neck, his mouth, his face, and wonder why you can’t do that anymore. What made you so broken and fucked up inside that all you’ve got left is the stuff that matters the least.

“I love you,” Steve murmurs some time when you’re not paying attention; “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and you bite his lip and his neck where you’ve been kissing him and press your teeth against his collarbone but he is insistent, he is brutal. He slides his hand from where it was pressed between the two of you and pulls on your shoulders and tilts back his head and there is the line of his neck, the quiver of his pulse. At times when you’re particularly—content, or weak, or desperate, or determined, you say it back and he is happy. I love you, I’m sorry.

 

 

 

 

You avoid the draft for so long. You were so close to getting away with it. You think about going to Canada and dragging Steve with you, but what’s the point? He would just apply for the Canadian army and get himself shipped overseas somehow anyway, and then you’d be stuck alone in Canada without him. What’s the point? Your mother and sisters are here and you look after them and Steve, and sometimes none of them resents you for it. Your sisters want to know why you dropped out of school to send them to it. You can’t explain it to them in a way that makes them happy, so you just stop trying.

You avoid it until you don’t. You’re a civilian until you aren’t anymore. Then you’re a soldier. Steve hates you for it. But he likes the uniform. You catch him looking at it one night, pressing his hands against all the sharp lines and clean pressed fabric. He stands there looking at it and you look at him, unnoticed for now. He pulls the chain out from inside the pocket—looks at your name there, neatly pressed into the metal of the dog tags. You watch him run a finger over the letters and you feel sorry for watching him, sorry for all you’ve taken away from him, and now you’re taking this away too. He puts the dog tags away. He lifts the uniform from the bed and buries his face in it and takes a long deep shuddering breath. Your chest aches. When he finally lowers the uniform, his eyes are red, and the fabric is damp.

You can’t bear knowing that. You enter the room, quietly. He looks up at you—defiant, unembarrassed. He is going to say something awful, like _take me with you,_ or _don’t go,_ but then he doesn’t say either. He just refolds the uniform and puts it back on the bed, and then he says something even worse. “Sorry.”

That breaks your heart. You can’t stand that. You don’t know how, but you put your arms around him and press him close. “C’mere,” you tell him, as if you aren’t already as close as you can physically be. “Don’t, okay? You got nothing to be sorry for. I’m sorry. I never wanted it to be like this.” You hesitate. “I love you.”

Steve is very still. He puts his arms around you and holds you tightly, and then you realize you’re trembling, and he is the one, now, who is holding you.

So it is the war that tears you apart this time. Big deal. That has happened to a thousand thousand people and thousand thousand times before, and it’s going to keep happening. Better a war than a homemade molotov, or a brick to the face, or your parents finding out. And better you going overseas than him. Even if, when you come close to saying that, Steve’s face goes dark and angry and bitter and you know that is your fault. You don’t want to go. That has never mattered before.

Steve wants to be alone but you can’t bear to be, not right now, not the night before you have to ship out, and he is too devoted not to be there for you. Because he loves you or because he feels responsible for you? You’re too afraid to ask about that, but selfish enough to ask him to stay, and so he does.

“Don’t you dare fucking leave,” Steve says, bearing down as you fuck him, and for a moment you think—no, of course not, I’ll never leave, I’ll stay forever even if the army comes and quarters me. “I swear, Bucky, I can’t—god—I won’t, if you wanted me to be here on this night of all nights you had better—oh—stay, I swear....”

“I won’t,” you tell him, and hold him close and press kisses against him and he arches up against you, shocked and surprised but also angry and resentful, and you think, yes, I deserve that too.

“I love you,” you tell him against the soft of his hair, you murmur it against the curve of his neck, the pulse of his heart in his chest, and he runs his fingertips all over you, on your back, your mouth, your hands, like he can’t believe it, like he can’t believe that you’re saying it. You stay the night and you wake up next to him and he goes with you to the shipyard when you leave, in your fine-pressed uniform, and he salutes you. You want to kiss him in broad daylight, in front of the whole fucking United States military. Maybe that would be enough to get you kicked out and you could stay here.

You don’t do it. “I’ll write,” you lie.

“Yeah,” he says; “you better.”

 

 

 

 

It’s the first time you’re sent out, off to training. You get sent back a little while later, then out again, then back; then you get assigned to the 107th and you don’t come back again after that; not ever.

 

 

 

 

It’s not that you don’t write any letters. It’s just that you don’t send them. You can’t say anything right. You tell yourself that you’re so deep behind enemy lines most of the time that the letters wouldn’t even reach Steve. You’re probably right. That doesn’t change the fact that you still never even tried to send them. You keep the letters that you draft pressed in your journal next to the letters that Steve does send to you—the ones that make it.

_Steve,_

_I’m sorry. Bet you’re sick of hearing that._

 

_Steve,_

_It’s beautiful here sometimes. So beautiful it makes my heart ache. I ~~t makes me think of you~~  See? I can’t even write that out when you're not gonna read it. War doesn’t make things beautiful, but it makes you appreciate more what already is beautiful, before it gets destroyed and washed away. So much of the beauty here is being washed away. I’m afraid of what would happen to you, if you were here._

_I’ll be fine ... don’t worry about that. There never was much to me, once you get deep into the heart of it all._

_—Bucky_

 

 

 

 

(1936)

“It’s going to be like this forever,” Steve says. He lies on his back on his bed, kicking his heels against the wall. “God, I can’t take that.”

You sit on the floor with your back against the bed, and Steve’s head hangs off the edge of it, so close to yours. You’re reading a book, but you’re thinking about him. The thump of his feet against the walls.

“It won’t, though,” you point out. “You won’t live at your mom’s place forever, you’ll get out of here, you’ll go out and do something incredibly world-changing or whatever it is that you want—”

Steve kicks the wall, and smacks you. You smile, bite your lip.

“Don’t worry about it,” you tell him. Stop thinking about his mouth, you tell yourself. “Just let it happen.”

“Since when did you become all loosened up and shit,” Steve says. “You’re scaring me a little, Buck.”

That makes two of you. “Mm,” you hum, and turn the page, and then Steve kicks at the wall some more, again and again, and something clicks inside of him, or he makes up his mind all at once, or—you don’t know what, really; you can’t explain it. You’ve thought about this moment again and again throughout your life, over and over, trying to figure out what happened that made Steve Rogers so damn brave, that made him roll over and pull the book out of your hands and toss it across the room. You try to protest but then he grabs your face and, sideways, lying on the bed still, he pulls you in and kisses you on the mouth and your whole body goes still.

“Oh,” you say when he pulls away. You think about hellfire. “That’s what you meant.”

“Yeah, asshole,” Steve says, and he gets up to retrieve your book from where he tossed it on the floor.

 

 

 

 

(1943, later)

Okay—so they _did_ tell you what would happen if you fell in love like this: sideways, with your best friend. They told you that you’d burn and go to hell, and you don’t even believe in hell, never have, you’re Jewish, but sometimes Steve does and you can see that fear in his eyes when he talks about God. He is not necessarily afraid of the burning, or the hell, but afraid that maybe people are right when they say that this is wrong and you’re both evil for it.

They told you it would hurt, they told you it would never last, they told you that you would never be happy. They told you not to bother. They told you to do it right, to do anything on earth but this: be anything but this. You tried to listen.

But they never told you—that even though you know all of that, even though you saw the house on fire down the street—you would still love him anyway.

What the hell? You feel like they probably could have mentioned it.

 

  

 

You’re not good at war, until you are. You get better faster than most of the people around you. You wonder what that says about you, and what you are inside. Then you decide you don’t care. You never wanted to be here; they made you come. They made you this way.

That’s what you tell yourself.

 

 

 

They told you war would be honorable. They told you it would be heroic, that you would save dozens of people, hundreds, by yourself every damn day. They told you it would be fast and easy and that everything would happen in bright and beautiful color. They told you war would make you a hero. Instead it makes you empty, and you aren’t honorable. None of you are, kicking mud from your boots at night and shivering in your sleep and scratching out letters to people who never even get them. And then the next day you get up and you pick up your gun and you kill someone with it, sometimes more than one, before the day is done.

They told you a bunch of bullshit, is what they did. You never even believed it—never wanted to be here, one of the few in this company who got drafted and didn’t volunteer, and sometimes that sets you apart from the rest so much that you can feel it, palpable, in the air between you—but it would have been nice had even part of it been true. One small piece.

You wonder what Steve is doing. But you don’t like to think about Steve here. Sometimes things are beautiful—at dawn, when the light is clear and true, or in the mountains when you can see for miles—and you think, if only he could see this. But if he saw this then he would see all the rest of it, too. Better not see any of it at all.

 

 

_Bucky,_

_So much is happening without you here, but because you’re not here hardly any of it seems real. I guess that’s a good thing, because otherwise I can’t keep my head on straight. It helps to think about you. I know you’re alive even though you haven’t answered any of my letters. Stubborn. Do you think about me, when you’re out there? What an awful question. I’m sorry that I don’t know what it’s like for you. I’m sorry for all those times I didn’t listen. Promise not to be mad the next time you see me? Promise, please._

_I’ll take your silence as a yes._

_—S._

 

 

 

They strap you to a table. You’re thinking about Steve, the red in his face when he read your draft letter. Your wrists and ankles are bound so tight that you lose feeling, and there is a binding across your waist, too, and one holding your head in place. So that you don’t hurt yourself while they’re hurting you, or something. You think about that letter you never wrote, all the things you couldn’t bring yourself to say. You think about someone breaking the edge of your mouth against the lip of a dumpster, then kicking your teeth in. The small man with the glasses comes back and injects something into your elbow, and then you don’t think much at all anymore.

What are they doing? You don’t know, you don’t care. Half your unit got captured, and in your worst moments you think maybe it’s all your fault, because the small man with the glasses seems to know you somehow. You don’t see any of the others anymore. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe you will be soon, too.

 

 

 

(1945)

You don’t die. 

 

 

 

Eyes open mouth shut screaming but—don’t look at the light don’t look at the light DON’T—

You looked and now it’s inside of you, it’s burning you up. You thought you were an empty house already gutted, but you were wrong; there was still so much left that they could take. They take the rafters and plaster board and the floors and the windows and they take the foundations and all that’s left is the crawl space underneath and they set that on fire, too.

A molotov cocktail straight to the face. 

 

 

 

Steve’s father died of mustard gas. Isn’t that funny? You don’t know why it’s funny, but somehow it is. Legacies, and things like that. You wonder how Steve felt when he died, whether he laughed, whether it was funny. An airplane right into a glacier. Pow! Right in the kisser. You knew he was meant to do great things. Guess you should have known he would die doing them.

You don’t do great things. You forget your name, and you forget Steve, and you forget the war, and you forget yourself. You always thought that you would die because of who you are, what you are inside. Instead it turns out they can just take all of that away and it won’t matter anymore. Isn’t that funny?

 

 

 

 

(1936 again)

“Steve,” you say. He’s handing you the book. You can’t remember the title in later years, but you will always remember the look on his face. The vulnerability and fear and bright burning defiance. You love him.

“Bucky,” he says back, just as flippant as if this is any other day, any other moment, and he has kissed anyone else but you.

“What was that?” you ask him, because you’re an idiot and you love him.

“Thought for sure you’d know what a kiss was by now,” Steve says. “Damn, Bucky, all those girls you lied about taking to the theater.”

He’s joking, but you actually did lie about all those girls. That’s funny, isn’t it. There’s a punchline in there somewhere.

“I mean,” you say, backpedaling and hitting empty air, “sure, um.”

A pause. “Are you mad?”

You’re furiously empty. “No,” you say, and he relaxes. “Come here.”

You kiss him, again and again. You think, they will never stop us now. You think, I’ll never forget this, but you will.

 

  

 

 

(1945, a day earlier)

_Steve,_

_I’m writing this even though you’re asleep right next to me, and I’m never going to show it to you, and that makes me feel bad, real bad, and I’m sorry, but I can’t—_

_You saved me. You saved me. Not when you pulled me out of that prison camp, not when you showed up looking like something from a fever dream, something I’d be embarrassed to think about in the light of day, sweat and muscle and your eyes still the same. Long before that, Steve. You saved me long before that._

_Yours._

 

 

 

Roll over. He’s right there next to you like you always dreamed he would be, even if you never wanted him here amid all this. He’s so goddamn beautiful and you’re a mess. You put your arm around his middle and bury your face against the back of his neck and breathe in and breathe in and breathe in. Somehow he wakes up, already better at sleeping restless in a battlefield than you are, and he mumbles something, turns to face you, one hand coming up to rest against your face. He makes a shocked sound when he feels dampness there.

“Bucky—”

Kiss him, hard and fast. He arches against you and doesn’t mention that you’re crying the entire time, the whole way through, his hand pressed between the two of you, wrapped around you, your face pressed against the crook of his neck and staining him red with your stupid fucking emptiness. You come, trembling against him, and you’re shaking so bad you can hardly move otherwise, and he’s holding you, pressing kisses against the top of your head, whispering your name over and over. You try to reach for him, to get him off, he’s still hard and you feel like you’ve used him but he won’t let you touch him. He bats your hand away and says, “Jesus, Bucky, just let me fucking take care of you,” and you have nothing to say to that.

 

 

 

They never told you that you would fall and he wouldn’t, that you’d never even get to say you’re sorry.

 

 

 

The other Commandos have their suspicions. They’re not stupid. But apparently they trust in Captain America enough to ignore the fact that he’s sleeping with his first sergeant every night. Steve is so beautiful and that’s the only thing that keeps you from pitching off the edge of a very long cliff. Steve with maps spread before him and an algorithm in his eyes. In inclining his head towards the end, he can’t fail.

Anyway, there are others like you in the army. You came across a few of them before Steve got there. You didn’t—it’s not that you—you could just tell, and they could tell, and that’s a bond that goes deeper than a soldier’s camaraderie sometimes, it just is. So the Commandos don’t treat you any differently—and somehow that is a disappointment and a relief, a blessing even when it grates like rusted iron. You just want to go home, but you can already see that this is where Steve belongs. You want to go home but Steve wants to stay, and so here you are, and you’re sharing his bed, and isn’t that home, anyway? Isn’t that what you really want?

Him, above you. His kisses falling on you like rain. “God, Bucky,” he moans, and you love that, you do, “you’re so—just—”

“What,” you manage to say; “what is it, baby,” and then you hope he didn’t hear you, but he did. His hands fall on you and hold you steady and his eyes are shining.

“I love you,” he says. It’s not the first time he has said it but it still feels like it is, every time.

“Yeah?” you say. “Even though—” don’t say it don’t say it don’t do this now, but you can’t stop “—you see how they look at us, right? The others.”

Mostly at Bucky, because Steve is Captain America. But even then, sometimes, when his back is turned....

Steve stops. Pushes away from Bucky, slowly. “Is that all you have for me?” he asks. “Really? Jesus, Bucky, I’m just trying to—I’ve been trying so hard, this whole time, and all you wanna talk about is the stuff I can’t change, even when I’ve been doing so damn much for you every goddamn second—”

“For _me?”_ you sputter, because—that’s not right, and even if it were, well, it’s not like you deserve any of that, and you never asked for it. You’re the one who’s been doing his best to look out for him, your eye to your rifle’s scope every damn second, watching his back, keeping him safe.

“Bucky,” Steve says, in that way that you hate, “I know you’re afraid, and I get it. Even though you think I don’t—” you have never thought that “—I do. But I can’t bear it anymore, not like this. You don’t have to be afraid with me.”

His voice falls, suddenly. He says, “Or of me.”

“I’m not,” you say. You’re baffled.

“I _love_ you,” he says. “Why can’t you see that?”

You want to reach out to him but he’s so far away. “I can,” you tell him; “I can, I know,” and he sighs and comes close to you and buries his face in your neck and says nothing when you tell him you love him too.

 

 

 

The next day, you fall from the train into the ravine, your hand outstretched towards Steve and the tears streaming down his face. You think of all the things you never said, but now it’s too late.

You don’t die. A few days later, Steve does. So it goes.

 

 

 

 

(???)

You like it best when you work alone. Then it’s less obvious, the ways you just aren’t right; how you can’t look people in the eyes, and how you never know what to say. Don’t speak unless spoken to. You hate that repeating that makes it easier, but it does. You get good at doing what you’re told, and you do it fast, the faster the better, because the faster you work the sooner they put you back on the ice and you don’t have to think anymore. It’s hard to think when you have nothing to think about. Thoughts turn on hinges that open nothing, and all the doors slam shut. Smoke seeps from underneath them.

There isn’t much to say about this part. They told you Steve was dead and you believed them until you forgot who Steve was. And then it didn’t matter anymore. This is the oldest story there is. It’s a story that will kill you in the telling.

“C’mon, Bucky,” Steve might have said. “It’ll be fun.”

That’s what he always said.

 

 

 

“You hear what S.H.I.E.L.D. found?”

“Yeah.” The sound of mechanical whirring, and a slow grasp towards consciousness. “’Course, they’ll likely keep a tight leash on him and we won’t get anywhere close…but still, funny, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“This one.” Someone slaps you across the face. “He was the Captain’s first sergeant, during the war.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah.” A short laugh. Restraints snap back and you fall to your knees. Another blow to the face. “Wonder if they’d even recognize each other now. ‘Course, this one never will again.”

 

 

 

(They were wrong.)

  

 

 

There’s a bridge, and you’re standing in the middle of it. They never told you how much this would hurt. They never told you that he wouldn’t die, not so long as there was a chance that he could come back for you.

To be fair, you should have known that from the start.

 

 

 

  

(1940)

Steve breathes a kiss against your neck. “Sleepy.”

“I can see that.” He is nodding off on your shoulder, but still trying to slip his hands beneath your shirt, his fingertips seeking warm skin. “Hey, keep it in your pants, Rogers.”

A burst of laughter against your neck. “Not what you said last night. Or this morning.”

“Really? I don’t recall.”

His hands, still moving. “Just wanna touch you. Be close to you—”

“You’re pretty damn close to me already,” you say. He is sad and tired today and you know this because you’ve been trying to make him smile all day. A few times you even managed it. His mouth still presses, dry, against the pulse point in your neck, and his lashes against the underside of your jaw. He’s so beautiful. You wish....

He mutters something you don’t catch. “Steve?”

“Sleepy,” is all he says again, and you can’t help but laugh.

“C’mon,” you tell him. “Get up. Bed’s over there.”

“Can’t.” He doesn’t move from where he’s lying on top of you. “Can’t do it, Buck.”

Unreal. “Want me to carry you?”

A pause.

“Steve?”

Then a nod.

His wish is your command. “C’mon, then,” you say, and gently stand and pick him up, so that he and the blanket both are caught in your arms.

He sighs happily. “Strong.”

“You like that?” you ask him. “These big guns.”

“Shut up, asshole,” and that’s the Steve you know right there, familiar as a song you sing to yourself.

“What would you be,” Steve asks as you lay him on the bed, “if you could be anything?”

You think about it. “I don’t know,” you say, and lie down next to him. “Enough.”

“Geez,” Steve says. “I was gonna say—” But he doesn’t tell you.

 

 

 

 

(2016)

They tell you that the war is over now. They tell you that, because you need the telling. None of that makes it true, though.

You’re in a grocery store staring at the eggs. What the fuck? There’s no place for you here. Those eggs want you to get the fuck out. Those eggs want you to remember that you’re not a normal person and that you better stop pretending to be one.

“Are you all right, sugar?”

There’s an older woman talking to you in Hungarian. You answer, unaccented, “Yes,” and “thank you,” and pick out a carton of eggs and put it in your bag. By the time you get back to your tiny apartment, half the eggs have somehow been crushed and are leaking out of the bottom of the bag. You clean it up and smoke a cigarette on the roof, thinking now that you have things to think about.

 

 

Steve shows up the next day. Of course. And then so does everyone else.

 

 

  

 

Afterwards, you think, inexplicably, of what he said to you the night before you fell. “I _love_ you.” (His face shining.) “Why can’t you see that?”

The thing is that you did. You do. It’s the seeing that frightens you.

On the quinjet out of Siberia—both of you bloody, you missing an arm, Steve with bruises all over his face—he pulls you close to him, and he doesn’t say anything. You breathe in the smell of his skin, of sweat and dirt and blood. You want to say something but you have nothing to say. The two of you fought, right before the end—the end of the war for you both.

“I have to get the others,” Steve says, “from where Stark locked them up.”

You lean—not away, but sideways, seeking distance between the two of you and never finding it. “Now?”

“Soon.”

Soon you won’t be alone anymore. Soon the quiet will be over. “And are you planning on doing that with or without me?”

Steve doesn’t say anything for a moment. His hands have fallen to either side of your waist, and he holds you there, steady, while you struggle to find objectivity. To comprehend the parallax, the distance from here to the end. Why everything seems so different through Steve’s eyes.

He says, “That’s up to you.”

It is hard not to be exhausted. Steve: everything close to the chest, nothing revealed that never has to be. You suppose you’ve always been the same way, and that’s why this is so damn hard. What you want is an answer to a question that you have never asked.

He takes your silence as a response, which you did not intend. He releases you and goes to the quinjet’s controls, even though they’re on autopilot and he hasn’t touched them this whole time. He puts his hand on the back of one of the seats, like he is steadying himself, and you wish you had something else to give him, something better, something true. One of those letters you wrote during the war and never sent.

“I missed you,” you tell him, quietly. It has to be enough.

He turns and looks at you. His eyes blue-black in the dark. The silent working of his jaw. “Yeah,” he says. “I—yeah.”

“Still do,” you murmur, and then you don’t know what else to say.

He takes your face in his hands. “Bucky,” he says, and he says it like you’re going home; like there is no doubt about where both of you are going next. He is quiet, and then: “Do you remember that bar we went to, after the prison camp? They bombed the shit out of it. I remember thinking if that wasn’t—just like it, just the way of things. This one place I wanted to go, because it was where you and I had been together once, and it was gone.”

You remember it, barely, your memory broken up by the influence of the booze you drank that night rather than—well, you know. You had been so unhappy, so drunk, in so much pain. After you left the bar Steve had taken you to his tent—he had a tent now, and he was a part of the army now, a captain and all—and made love to you in it, a little rough because you asked him to be even though you could see that he just wanted to hold you and remind you what it meant to be gentle. He loved you and he kissed you and he held you when you shook and shook and when you went still.

And now—

He steps towards you. Close. There’s a bruise blooming dark and bloody across his right cheekbone, and some of the blood vessels have burst in his eye. You miss him so much. You want to ask him why he never came to you until he had to, until the CIA was bursting through your door. Selfish. But you couldn’t have gone to him. That would have changed the dynamic. That would have made him feel—

Responsible.

You want him to feel something for you that isn’t from guilt, that is not because he thinks it is his fault that this is your life now and he wants his due penance. You can’t give him that. You don’t have anything left to give.

You realize you’re standing still. Steve is still watching you. He reaches up—slowly, letting you track the movement of his hand with your eyes. Blood seeps from split knuckles beneath his gloves, and the smooth expanse of his palm. Then he doesn’t move any further, just stands there, and you take a breath and close your eyes and lean into him. He puts his bloody hand to your face, his thumb brushing just below your eye. His other hand grips your shoulders.

“It was all such a long time ago,” you say.

He wipes away the wetness beneath your eyes. “Not that long ago," he says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
